Season One: The Prologue
My experience with women first began with growing up around my mom, my grandmother, my mother’s 3 sisters and my closest cousin. Then I was enrolled into an all girl’s catholic school for grade school, and then to another all girl’s catholic school for highschool. Consistently being surrounded by women and also unsupervised during the age of the internet, there’s no surprise I turned out how i am — a queer girl’s girl who obsesses over her female relationships, be it platonic, filial or in the rare occasion, romantic.
Perhaps you wonder about the title of this soon-to-be buzzing blog: Sappho and the City. One sleepless night, I had been binge watching the hit TV show of a similar name, Sex and the City and it got me inspired to talk about relationships too. If Carrie knew men, I knew women. It also dawned on me just how entertaining my own encounters with women were. As rare as my love life had been, each chapter of it was as exciting as a new episode of Carrie’s life. Not to mention, I have three girlfriends of my own, constantly there and consistently getting updated with the whirl and organized mess of my young adult life. The only thing missing were rounds and rounds of cosmopolitans.
Yes, there is a big difference between Carrie and I. She’s 35 (at least by season 4); I’m approaching 21. She’s a columnist. I'm a fashion student in college. She’s in the city that never sleeps, New York; I’m in New York, Cubao. She’s got a shopping addiction, I also have a shopping addiction. Only, I can’t afford Blahniks. But I find myself resonating more with her than any of the other girls in the cast. Drawn to share morsels of my own womanly intuition and wisdom, I decided to try my hand at her work with my own little twist.
So why Sappho? She’s a famous Greek poet known for her lyrical hymns about loving women and to put it simply, I am a queer woman talking about my relationships with women. To be specific, a femme lesbian sharing her discoveries as she traverses the bumpy roads of girlhood, loving women and cultivating lasting relationships with them. From the first blush of romance, to sapphic heartbreaks all the way to co dependent homoerotic female friendships a la Bunny by Mona Awad, I’ll write about it all.
I may have no Mr. Big in his Armani suits, or Aiden with his masculine, American charm to talk about. But I do have a laptop and stories to share about the highs and lows of being a young 20-something year old girl who loves women.